Sauteing and Pan Flipping

Learn the basics of sautéing and how to practice tossing your food in the air like a pro with Dana Tomlin. Dana demonstrates proper technique while making a delicious goat cheese and bell pepper omelet. Once you've got your flip down, change up your omelet with your favorite fillings.

Find more Co+op Kitchen videos featuring information and easy recipes for making delicious meals at home, as well as handy hints from chefs and food enthusiasts who love sharing their passion for great food.

Video Transcript

Hi. I'm Dana Tomlin. I'm the deli manager at Wheatsville Food Co-op in Austin, Texas. Today I'm going to be showing you how to use a sauté pan and how to flip in the air.

When you sauté, you're using a dry, high heat, which enables your food to cook really fast, get a good sear, and, with the aid of the sauté pan, you're going to flip it, which causes it to get mixed really well.

Learn how to pan flip

What I want you to do at home is to try this with beans, and I'm going to show you how it mixes with beans and rice.

So this is the motion for flipping. Shake back and forth, and then you pull towards you. Shake and then pull towards you. You can see that the lip of the pan is what causes that food to flip back on you. And you don't have to shake it hard. You don't have to pull it back hard. Just real easy. Boom, like that.

Now I'm going to put the rice back here in the back to show you sautéing and the motion of flipping can mix foods. Flip. Shake, shake.

Flip. This is a really easy way for you to get used to flipping before you actually put an egg in it.

How to make and flip an omelet

Now we're going to make an omelet using this technique. I'm going to show you how to chop your veggies for the beginning of your omelet and how to sauté in the pan.

I've got a prepped red onion right here. The way that I like to prep my onions for this type of sauté is to cut them this way. This gives you nice little slivers, which are really good for omelets.

I like to use red and green bell peppers for this because it's a nice mix of colors, which looks really nice in an omelet.

And we're good to go. I'm going to go ahead and get my sauté pan nice and hot for sautéing.

I'm going to do butter and olive oil. That way I get the flavor of the butter, but I'm going to mix it with the olive oil so that the milk solids in the butter don't burn.

So you can tell that it's ready to go when it looks like this. If it was just olive oil, it would start to shimmer a little. So now it's nice and hot. I'm going to turn it down to medium, and I'm going to drop my onions and bell peppers in.

Let's shake it. Then flip it in the air. Then leave it down on the burner for a little bit so that pan gets good and hot.

Dump this in here. Get it out of that hot skillet. All right. There we go. So this is going to be what we use when make our omelet.

Okay, so I'm going to crack three eggs.

So get your oil nice and hot. You want to move it around so that it's coating the bottom of the pan really well. Once it's good and hot, I'm going to put my eggs in. And this is the fun part. You can hear that sizzle.

That is perfect. The trick to making an omelet is that you leave the sides of the omelet alone so that they hold form, and then you scramble inside. Sometimes you'll need to take your spatula and run it along the edge to make sure that the egg has lifted.

This is really good. You can tell it's a little curled up. That's how I know it's ready to go. So shake it a little. Back and forth motion.

There you go. I'm going to take some of the onions and bell peppers and put them just on one side. And some goat cheese.

You're just going to slide it out. And then as it gets to about half way, you're going to use that skillet to flip it over. And then there you go!